Webinars

Live discussions of important social innovation topics

Our on-demand SSIR Live! webinars are offered every 4-6 weeks, and feature the Stanford Social Innovation Review’s most provocative and important topics. The registration fee is $49 per 2011-2014 webinar, or $19 per 2009/2010 webinar, and includes on-demand access for 12 months—so if you missed the live presentation, you can still register and view it at your convenience.

Social Impact Bonds (SIBs) are among the newest and most promising innovations within the impact investing space. Four years after the first SIB launched in the U.K., the US market is now gaining traction. At the federal level, President Obama’s FY 2015 Budget includes almost $500 million in investments for states to undertake Pay for Success programs. However, challenges must be faced before the market can realize its full potential and drive large-scale social impact. Please join Tracy Palandjian and Sam Schaeffer for a discussion on developments that are critical for SIBs to become a well-established option for funding effective social interventions at scale. This webinar is for social sector leaders, philanthropists, policy makers, and businesspeople who want to better understand the developments required to establish a thriving Social Impact Bond market.

Many—and some leaders believe most—nonprofit boards are ineffective. Much is at stake. Weak board governance can diminish a nonprofit’s social impact, cause it to founder, and even die. But any board can improve its performance if its members are willing to confront the people, processes, and behavior challenges that cause ineffectiveness. Join Kim Starkey Jonker, William F. Meehan III, and Kathy Spahn for a discussion on the nine attributes of effective nonprofit board governance. This complimentary webinar is for social sector board members, executive directors, funders who assess and influence grantee board governance, and managers/staff who work with board members—anyone who seeks to create an organization with consistently effective governance in order to radically increase impact for beneficiaries.

Fundraising mystifies, if not terrifies, most social enterprise leaders. In truth, both for-profit and nonprofit fundraising is a simple, learnable skill. If you can talk, you can raise social impact money. Empower yourself! Join Jonathan C. Lewis, serial social entrepreneur and host of the Café Impact social entrepreneurship video series, to learn his fundraising tips, including the Non-Pitch Pitch, the Pre-Pitch Non-Planning Period, and the Post-Pitch Phase. This webinar is for current and aspiring social entrepreneurs and those who support them. If you consider yourself a social entrepreneur, then you must learn to raise money. In Lewis’s own words, “Your social mission deserves it. Your social venture requires it.”

Social sector leaders around the world are getting impatient. Conscious of the enormity of the need that exists, they are no longer satisfied with impact that expands only incrementally. Now that they know “what works,” there is a deep urgency to help bring solutions to a truly transformative scale, a scale that begins to actually solve the problems we face. But doing so will require new ways of thinking, acting, and investing. Join these social sector leaders for a conversation on pathways for making the leap from incremental to transformative. This complimentary webinar is for social sector leaders, philanthropists, policy makers, and businesspeople who want to better understand the challenges faced by those in pursuit of impact at a transformative scale.

Over the last decade, many foundations have begun to lose their appetite for risk and experimentation in favor of safer, more proven, and incremental investments. But a small group of funders has begun to deliberately seek out and support high-risk, high-reward innovations with the potential to create real breakthroughs on our most intractable social problems. Join four innovation funders for a discussion on the processes and practices that help foundations and grantmakers incorporate a greater degree of risk-taking, experimentation, and flexibility into their work. This webinar is for philanthropists and grantmakers who are ready to take risks and think outside the box when it comes to tackling social problems, and for nonprofit leaders who want to want to encourage innovation in funding.

In spite of an improving economy, nonprofit mergers continue to lag their for-profit counterparts. Nonprofit leaders are finding that progress is being made on some of the major barriers that have prevented nonprofits from exploring mergers, yet three softer issues are miring due diligence: getting boards aligned, finding roles for senior staff, and blending brands. Join these social sector leaders when they discuss how organizations can overcome these challenges and the organizational factors that support successful mergers.

By applying big data to their research, organizations can better inform their decision-making, understand the fields in which they work, and achieve the greatest impact. Join Jon Sotsky of the Knight Foundation, Sean Gourley of Quid (Knight Foundation’s data analytics firm), and DoSomething.org’s Jeffrey Bladt as they discuss new ways to help people engage around complex issues and research, applying breakthrough techniques in data mapping and visualization. They will use their recent collaboration on the report, “The Emergence of Civic Tech: Investments in a Growing Field,” to provide insights on integrating data-driven models into social sector research and the trend toward open sharing of data and ideas. This webinar is for strategy and assessment teams, research and communication professionals, and anyone at foundations, nonprofits, and social enterprises focused on highlighting the impact of their work.

How can you build a capacity for innovation within your social purpose organization? Join Warren Nilsson and Tana Paddock as they discuss the theory and practice of “inscaping”—their term for the work of drawing on personal experience to generate the raw material of social change. Nilsson will present examples and insights from specific organizations that use inscaping to foster innovation “from the inside out.” Also joining the webinar is Marlon Parker, founder of RLabs, a social enterprise based in Cape Town that promotes community-driven innovation in 21 countries. This webinar is for people at nonprofit organizations, foundations, and other social purpose groups who want to create internal processes that will help to build a deep, long-lasting capacity for innovative thought and action.

The topic of how to fund programs that have social impact elicits a wide range of reactions. Some funders only support programs that have been proven to be effective, while others are willing to take a risk and fund unproven approaches. Some funders believe that the only reliable evaluation is a randomized control trial, while others argue that these are rarely useful, particularly for programs that tackle wicked social problems, like poverty. Some funders lead with their heart, while others lead with their brain. Join us for a lively discussion on funding for impact with presenters Jeff Raikes, Tom Tierney, and Lisbeth Schorr, all whom have long and distinguished careers in philanthropy and evaluation.

Innovation is all the rage. In this complimentary webinar, academic scholars and nonprofit leaders Seelos, Mair, May, and Joseph will examine innovation as an organizational process, looking at the ingredients needed to make the process productive as well as the pathologies that if not addressed can make it derail. The webinar will examine questions such as: How is innovation triggered and enacted? Can organizations get better at innovation over time? What role do stakeholders and governance play in stimulating or stifling innovation? Since the value of innovation lies in an organization’s ability to scale up its outcomes, the presenters will also reflect on the important balance that must be struck between innovating and scaling up.